Conversations on Conflict Photography: Virtual Roundtable 9-9-21

The Southeast Museum of Photography is proud to present a virtual roundtable discussion with Conversation on Conflict Photography curators Lauren Walsh and Keith Miller in conversation with featured photographers Rodrigo Abd, Shahidul Alam, and Eman Helal.

Moderators:

Keith Miller is a curator, filmmaker, and artist. Since 2008 he has been the curator of the Gallatin Galleries and has curated over forty gallery and museum exhibitions. From 2001 to 2008 he was the curator of the SAC Gallery at Stony Brook University. In 2015 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he has been a part-time professor at Gallatin School for Individualized Study at NYU since 2006 and was awarded the Gallatin School Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014.

Lauren Walsh teaches at The New School and New York University, where she is the Director of the Gallatin Photojournalism Lab. Her recent book, Conversations on Conflict Photography, is a powerful exploration of the visual documentation of war and humanitarian crisis and is the subject of the current SMP exhibition. She is the Director of Lost Rolls America, a national public archive of photography and memory. Her forthcoming book is Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter.

Panelists:

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photographer and the founder of Drik Picture Library, a Bangladesh-based photo agency established to promote the work of local photographers. Alam has documented a wide range of events, including the movement for democracy in Bangladesh, natural disasters, human rights and social issues like class inequality, and murders by the “death squads” in Bangladesh. As a result of his work, Alam has received death threats, and in 1996 he was stabbed eight times. In 2018 he was arrested after publicly criticizing the government’s violent response to student protests. Alam is an outspoken advocate for the correction of human rights injustices.

Alam’s work has been shown in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia, and the Tate Modern in Britain. He was the first Asian recipient of the Mother Jones Award for Documentary Photography, and he is an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He received the 2014 Shilpakala Padak, the highest state award given to Bangladeshi artists, and in 2017 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dali International Photography Exhibition in China. In 2018, after his arrest by the Bangladesh government for speaking out against the abusive treatment of students, he was named one of Time’s Persons of the Year.

Eman Helal is an Egyptian photographer based in Cairo. She covered the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, including a project on injured protesters as well as work on sectarian violence against Christians, especially after the 2013 military coup. She also focuses on social issues, such as the physical and sexual harassment of women in Egypt, and efforts to empower women there. She has freelanced for the Associated Press, where her photos were distributed internationally, and her images have appeared in the New York Times, Stern, and Newsweek, among other publications.

Helal was named one of Magnum Foundation’s five Human Rights Fellows in 2013, and returned to work with the Foundation again as a Fellow in 2016. She judged the Shawkan Photo Award in 2015, and both the Egypt Press Photo Award and the Portenier Human Rights Bursary competition in 2016. Helal’s work has been exhibited in the Museum of Photography in Braunschweig, Germany, the Pil’ours International Photo Festival in Saint Gilles Croix de Vie, France, the DOCField 15 photography festival in Barcelona, Spain, and the Addis Photo Festival in Ethiopia, among other venues.

Rodrigo Abd is an Argentinian photographer and has been a staff photographer for the Associated Press based in Guatemala since 2003, with the exception of 2006, when he was based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Abd has worked on AP special assignments covering the political turmoil in Bolivia in 2003 and Haiti in 2004. He also covered Venezuela’s presidential elections in 2007 and 2012, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. In 2010, he has twice been embedded with US troops in the Kandahar province, Afghanistan. In 2011 he covered the political conflict in Lybia. In 2012 he covered the Syrian armed conflict.

Abd, along with fellow AP photographers, Manu Brabo, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra, and Muhammed Muheisen, were awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photograph for his gripping work covering the Syrian civil war.